Well that was unexpected. 🙃
You know how things have been oddly slow lately? Well, I only fixed one car today. 😶
Not because I was sick. Not because it was bad weather. Not because I screwed something up. I just… had three cars on the schedule, which is about four fewer than I normally do, and in the end, I only ended up fixing one. 🤷
So I didn’t make much money, and you know what? I don’t care.
I don’t care. I don’t care. I don’t care.
😆
I actually quite thoroughly appreciated not having a long day of work today.
I was tired. I was dealing with a mini migraine that kept coming and going. And… I’m still quite thoroughly burned out, so the extra day is lovely.
So… the three cars… the first one was going to 2007 Nissan Altima that needed a valve cover gasket. The job had been postponed once, due to not having the right part. So today was the day to finally get on it with the correct part.
Except… When I got there, I could tell it was going to be an absolute nightmare from the start. The engine vacuum hoses that are supposed to be nice pliable rubber were just about rock hard. I forgot that this was one of the engines that you have to support the engine from the bottom because they decided to put the motor mount over the top covering the actual valve cover.
And then the final nail in the coffin for me, The spark plug tube seals were leaking so badly that the spark plugs were completely submerged in oil.
😶
No. Just… no.
That job was going to take me probably 4 hours to do, and I was only going to get paid for fewer than two If I billed my original quoted price. Just cleaning out the spark plug wells alone without compressed air would probably have taken me an hour or two. So, I politely bowed out of the job, replaced the “rubber” vacuum hose that I had taken out that had broken in half, explain to him everything that he needed to explain to the shops I recommended, so he could get an accurate quote, didn’t charge him anything, and gratefully went on my way– Happy that even though I spent an hour that I didn’t get paid for, at least I wasn’t stuck doing that nightmare job That would have probably cost him a lot more than he could afford.
Car number two was going to a 2009 Honda pilot that had A whole bunch of issues. One was clunking in the front end that would cause the vehicle to jerk to one side, even going 70 mi an hour down the freeway. 😬
I took a look underneath, and I found that someone had not properly tightened the lower control arm. It was crazy loose. Not just a couple of turns of the bolt: more like several threads–like that Toyota the other day. So I got that properly torqued down, and I’ve also found that she had a really bad wheel bearing. I scheduled the repair for that for Friday. She was also having issues with her rear hatch not opening properly, and I took a brief look at that, but didn’t figure it out in the brief time that I spent looking at it.
And that was the work day. 🙃
One car, multiple issues, one issue fixed.
After that, I went home. I took the dogs to the Pea Ridge vet, but they didn’t have any chips, so I posted them on a couple of Facebook group dog lost and found pages.
We didn’t have a good collar so I could transfer the dogs from the dog run to my new huge doggy van, so the only thing I really had was a choke collar. 😕
The goldendoodle went in relatively painlessly. He wasn’t happy about it, but he went in anyway. The great Pyrenees just wasn’t having it. He fought and fought and fought and fought getting in, and finally, and I don’t know what caused him to do it, finally after fighting with him for a good while, and the choke collar being I’m sure quite unpleasant around his neck 😕, she actually ran right by me and jumped right in the van.
😶
Gratefully, the owners saw my post on the Facebook page and came and got the dogs. They lived about two and a half miles away from us along a very busy highway, so pretty amazing their dogs survived.
Helped Mom in the garden a little bit.
Started taking measurements for getting the shed fixed.
It was hard to get up the motivation to do stuff. It was just a burned-out day, but I got ads posted and reposted for the different vehicles that I’m selling.
Can I vent for a moment?
Can I just express how much of an annoyance, frustration, pet peeve, and/or whatever you want to call it that it is to me dealing with companies that are worth hundreds of billions of dollars who put out crappy products. Facebook marketplace is atrociously built. So frustrating to use. And it’s just simple things that could be fixed with simple adjustments to code. Having worked directly with a programmer, though I’m really not an expert, the features and code adjustments to make Facebook Marketplace are really fabulous tool are not big deals. I bet you Jared’s programmer could program the whole blasted structure and framework of a phenomenal online marketplace in a month by himself.
So frustrating. You’re worth hundreds of billions of dollars. C’mon, Facebook. Spend the chump change it would take to make it an excellent tool, not just a decent one.
End rant. 😅
What else… I spent some time cleaning up my room a bit.
I feel like I’m missing something pretty significant from the day, but I don’t remember.
Loves and hugs.
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 